The 2026 Organ Medicine Congress and the 1st Conference on High-Quality Development of Organ Transplant Hospitals opened in Guangzhou on September 5, with the theme of "New Track, New Platform, New Opportunities."
Officials responsible for organ transplantation from the National Health Commission and provincial health commissions, together with experts, scholars and practitioners in life sciences, gathered to discuss two major topics: the high-quality development of organ transplant hospitals and cutting-edge technologies in organ medicine, as China advances from "running alongside" to "leading" the global field.
Liu Liqun, director of the Guangdong Provincial Health Commission
Leading figures including Fan Shangda, Zheng Shusen and Dong Jiahong, academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and Dou Kefeng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, outlined the prospects for China's organ donation and transplantation endeavor in areas such as industry governance, organ donation, clinical techniques and disciplinary development.
He Xiaoshun, president of the Guangdong Society of Organ Medicine and Technology, and president of the 2026 Organ Medicine Congress
"Organ medicine is an important direction for the future of life sciences. We look forward to more colleagues joining to define and build this discipline together," said Professor He Xiaoshun, president of the congress and head of the organ transplant center at the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University.
He noted that organ medicine, which originates from but goes beyond organ transplantation, is expanding into organ research, education, repair, therapy and regeneration, serving as a bridge connecting surgery, oncology, critical care, engineering, material science and artificial intelligence.
At the congress, Björn Nashan, former president of the German Transplantation Society and professor of surgery at the First Affiliated Hospital of University of Science and Technology of China, released the "Top 10 Advances in Organ Medicine 2025."
The advances span xenotransplantation, machine perfusion, regenerative medicine and immunology. Highlights include the transplantation of a six-gene-edited pig lung into a brain-dead recipient, where the graft remained viable and functional for 216 hours; the delivery of human stem cell-derived kidney organoids into porcine kidneys via normothermic machine perfusion; and an international validation study of 473 liver perfusate samples from 10 centers across seven countries, confirming that the mitochondrial metabolite FMN can predict graft loss.
"I believe the ischemia-free transplantation approach will become the 'gold standard' of organ transplantation," said Fan Shangda.
This conference was hosted by the China Organ Transplantation Development Foundation and the Guangdong Society of Organ Medicine and Technology.
Reporter | Chen Jinxia
Photos | 2026 Organ Medicine Congress
